


watch there the day-shapes of dusk

by arabesque05



Category: Hockey RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-07
Updated: 2013-03-07
Packaged: 2017-12-04 15:41:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/712360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arabesque05/pseuds/arabesque05
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The third time, Sidney is taking out the trash, and the boy is having a staring match with a raccoon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	watch there the day-shapes of dusk

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to [salvamisandwich](http://archiveofourown.org/users/salvamisandwich/pseuds/salvamisandwich), for [ this picture](http://25.media.tumblr.com/d8911560ec69221d2bb083212423a8e8/tumblr_mj73sgFHNf1qdqh5go1_500.jpg), and from whom i stole the premise in the first place: "sorry but hacker!geno is going to be a thing okay. he’s a political activist. a hacktivist." sorry not sorry.
> 
> there actually isn't that that much activism, or hacking, in this at all.

The first time, Sidney’s at the library. The boy sitting across the table from him is tall, and skinny the way people who still have another growth spurt to go through are. At some point, the boy gets up, rounds the table, and asks Sidney in accented English, “Can I use plug?”, gesturing to the electrical socket by Sid’s chair. Sidney obligingly scoots his chair forward. The boy reaches down and plugs in his laptop, and they settle into their respective silences again.

When Sidney leaves, he marvels a little at how productive the evening had been. Usually, he dislikes sitting by people with laptops: the irregularity of their typing, the occasional ping of email, the clicking of the mouse all tend to be distracting. But something about the boy’s keyboard, maybe, or the fluidity of his typing—it had sounded like rain against the windows, pattering steadiness.

- 

The second time, Sidney’s jogging by the lake, the chill of the morning air stinging at his face. There’s a golden glow by the water’s edge, the sun starting to peek above the horizon. The boy is down by the water, a messenger bag slung over his shoulders, bent over and feeding ducks. At the sound of Sidney’s footsteps, he straightens and turns around. The ducks quack a little. The boy sees Sidney, and smiles, more in the curve of his eyes than by the crooked tilt of his mouth—and lifts a hand, a morning hello.

Sidney slows his pace, raises a hand back, awkward. He doesn’t know this boy, his name or age or where he’s from; Sidney doesn’t always wave hello to actual friends. But the boy’s smile only widens, pleased. Then he turns back to his ducks, their quacking dying down as his attention returns to them. Sidney supposes that’s that—and perhaps also: that simple, to greet someone like an old friend.

-

The third time, Sidney is taking out his trash, and the boy is having a staring match with a raccoon. “Um,” says Sidney.

The boy turns his head, but his eyes remain locked with the raccoon’s. “Yes?” he says. “Dumpster occupied—he not move.”

Sidney looks at the raccoon, and its eyes glow brightly back at him, through the bandit mask. “Jesus fuck,” says Sidney.

The boy gives a little laugh. “So cute, yes,” he agrees, which—no. No, that wasn’t what Sidney meant at all.

Manners take over. “I’m Sidney,” says Sidney.

“Evgeni,” says Evgeni, and then he makes a face. “Geno,” he amends.

“Hi,” says Sidney. “It’s nice to meet you. So, um…what should we do about—that?” He tilts his head at the raccoon still perched on top of the dumpster.

Geno breaks eye contact with the raccoon and looks over at Sidney. “Maybe—if he not come to me, I go to him?”

“No!” exclaims Sidney. “Holy shit—what if it has rabies?”

Geno tilts his head, considering. “No,” he decides at length. “I think he just hungry.” He smiles, and the expression is warmly fond even in the pale light of the moon. “He eat dinner, then we throw.”

“Oh my God, I’m waiting on a raccoon,” moans Sid. He doesn’t think about chucking his trash at the animal, though, and being done with it. That seems unconscionable. Who knows how long Geno’s been out here, in his board shorts and flip flops and wrinkled YOU HAD ME AT HELLO WORLD tshirt. Sid sighs. Then he shifts his trashbag to the other hand and asks Geno, with practiced determination to conduct small talk, “Okay, well. So what are you studying?”

Geno is studying computer science or maybe mathematics or maybe animal husbandry, Sidney can’t pin him down on one throughout Geno’s breathless enthusiasm about egyptian fractions! and binary cyclic subsets! and parakeets! and phi!

“Great number,” says Geno. “Maybe greatest.” He looks conflicted. “Maybe phi, maybe e. Tie, for me.”

Sidney wrinkles his nose. “No, it’s eighty-seven, which is an actual number, and not a letter masquerading as a number,” he says, and then regrets it a little. Sid comes off as condescending sometimes, when he chirps.

But Geno laughs, low and amused, and tells him, “Yes, I see you play, number eighty-seven.” And then the humor drops out of his voice. With terrible sincerity, he says, “Yes, maybe. Maybe eighty-seven best.”

-

The eighth time, Geno is sprawled out on Sid’s couch, long limbs askew and complaining about Sid being “tiny, so tiny.”

Sid spins around in his chair, toward the couch and kicks at one of Geno’s legs. “Fuck you, you’re just freakishly tall.”

“Normal tall,” says Geno, and shifts his head from where it had begun to slip off the couch arm. “Don’t kick patient.”

“You aren’t a patient,” says Sidney. “You’re not ill.”

“Ill with alcohol,” insists Geno.

“You didn’t have any alcohol,” says Sid. Geno hadn’t—his sleepy languor is the result of too much pizza and a terrible game of baseball being shown on the television.

“Poisoned by fumes,” replies Geno.

“Really,” says Sidney. “Really. How much alcohol is that.”

Geno lifts his head up. “I not tell you? Ovi is pledgemaster.” His head goes back down. “So much alcohol. Room full of alcohol. Desk covered, floor covered, bed covered—I sleep here.”

“Lazy,” says Sid, which he has learned is Geno’s favorite endearment insult and which is also not a _no_. Sleepovers were not why Sid wanted a single this year. But Geno swings his foot a bit, as it hangs over the arm of the sofa, dorky crew socks coming loose at the elastic and drooping down his slender shins. There is something irresistible about that, something vulnerable and comfortable and like that second morning by the lake, immediately familiar. Maybe that’s just Geno. 

-

The twenty-sixth time, Sidney comes back from practice to find Geno sitting cross-legged on Sidney’s bed, back against the wall and staring down at his computer screen. His eyes flicker up when Sid comes in, but the  _click-clack_ of the keyboard never falters.

“Ugh,” says Sidney, exhausted.

Geno shifts over on the bed, and breaks in typing to set his laptop on the bed by his knee. Sid crawls onto the bed and flops over and rests his head on Geno’s lap.

“Blankets,” says Geno absently, from where he’s either trolling 4chan or arguing with someone on stackoverflow or coding up something very prettily colorful. Maybe all three, judging by the number of open windows on his screen. “You catch cold.”

“Mmm,” hums Sidney, and gropes for a blanket and draws it over his stomach. “Who’re you arguing with?”

“Idiots,” says Geno, typing one handed and reaching over with the other to tug the blanket over Sid’s shoulder. He briefly passes his fingers through Sid’s hair—still wet from his shower—and then returns to typing.

“Wha’ ‘bout?”

“Vim, emacs, which better.” Geno’s tongue peeks out briefly when he smiles, mischief blatant. “No one bring up Hitler yet, but still early night.”

“You’re a terrible person,” says Sidney fondly. “Which one do you like?”

Geno pauses. “Unix cat,” he decides, after a moment.

Sidney laughs—not so much that he understood what a unix cat was—but because Geno is so obviously delighted by his own answer, and by cats in general, and because Sidney is warm and in bed and pleasantly exhausted and laughter seems like the thing to do.

- 

When Sidney has stopped keeping count, when the times start flowing into one another, as if he has known Geno forever, as if Geno has settled into Sidney’s bones and taken residence in his blood:

Some mornings, Sidney still meets Geno by the lake—Sidney up early for his morning run, Geno just coming back from the lab, sleepy and slightly rumpled and turning his pockets out for birdseeds to feed his ducks. On those days, Geno stays with his ducks a little longer and Sid runs his loop of the lake a little faster, and they head back to the dorms together, Sidney to shower and breakfast and Geno to crawl into Sidney’s bed and bury his nose into Sidney’s pillow and pass out.

Some evenings, there is still too much pizza and too much terrible baseball on the television (“Seriously,” says Sid, “why do you even watch this team?”). The couch is still too small and made all the more so trying to fit both of them. Then their limbs get tangled up and Geno hooks his feet over the back of Sid’s calves, and Sid presses his face into Geno’s neck, keeping one eye on the television, and it’s not the sort of cramped Geno ever complains about.

Geno’s team loses (“Hahahaha,” Geno laughs, and Sid doesn’t understand at all, this baseball team is seriously _the worst_ ). Then Sidney says, “Tell me something.”

“About?”

“Anything,” says Sidney, half asleep.

Geno thinks, and sometimes he tells Sid about cryptography by primes, or about Turing machines, or about countable infinities, or about turtles and hares. “Turtle and hare, they find cycles. Very pretty—you use on array, use value as indices, and then in linear time, constant space, find if array contain repeat. Amazing, yes?”

“Yeah,” says Sidney, who hadn’t understood the first 90% of what Geno had said but thought it amazing regardless.

They watch the commercials for a little bit. Sid thinks about the Polybius he needs to read. He doesn’t move. Geno asks, “Good day for hockey today?”

“Every day is a good day for hockey,” says Sidney, and wriggles his toes. “ _E_ _very_  day.”

Geno is laughing quietly again, trying to muffle it in Sidney’s hair.

“Terrible person,” says Sidney. “Did you do something terrible again today?”

“Yes,” says Geno, unrepentant. Then he says, “But they terrible too. I am—I am justice at night.”

“Oh, you’re Batman, now.”

“Yes,” agrees Geno. He works one hand free from where it’s wedged between Sid’s hip and the sofa back, and brings it up, brushing it against Sidney’s forehead, where a single lock of hair curls. “Batman better than Superman.”

“Lies!” declares Sidney, and Geno looks at him with that face, the smile and the tongue peeking out between his teeth, and Sidney knows it’s going to be a night of probably a lot of tickling and flying elbows and at some point they’re going to tumble off the sofa and then maybe tumble into bed, and there will be bruises the next morning, some more painful than others; and Sidney looks down at Geno, and helpless, helpless, laughing he leans in.

**Author's Note:**

> let me go to the window,  
> watch there the day-shapes of dusk  
> and wait and know the coming  
> of a little love.
> 
> \--carl sandburg

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [watch there the day-shapes of dusk [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1129938) by [adistantsun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adistantsun/pseuds/adistantsun)




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